Pages

Friday, November 14, 2014

Inside ‘The Room’

If you haven’t seen the 2003 cult
classic movie The Room, stop reading
and come back after viewing it here.
There is a reason it has attained the status of “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” – and that reason is a hilariously
oddball writer/director/producer/star named Tommy Wiseau. But many of its fans
are unaware of the surprisingly poignant backstory to both the movie and its
creator.

I was already aware of The Room and its awkward acting (“You
are tearing me apaaart, Lisa!”), memorably
weird dialogue (“Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!”),
inconsistent character motivations, scenes that go nowhere, and inexplicable
football motif. But I didn’t realize that the making of The Room was far more entertaining and intriguing than the film
itself until I stumbled recently across a 2013 book called The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the
Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, written by Tommy’s longtime friend
Greg Sestero, who also starred in and helped make the movie.

The book is an unexpectedly absorbing
page-turner, not just for its behind-the-scenes look at the wacky incompetence
of The Room, but because it also gradually
revealed the secretive Tommy Wiseau to be a lonely figure whose obsessive need
to express himself through this film masked an “immensely conflicted and
complicated darkness.”

An aspiring actor, Sestero first
encountered the defiantly eccentric Tommy, with his unidentifiable accent,
distinctive hair, and refusal to discuss his past, in an acting class. Sestero,
who found himself becoming Tommy’s best – and perhaps only – friend, slowly
teased out the details of Tommy’s obscure origins and the dark life experiences
that shaped him.

He lived on the street in Europe.
He was wrongfully arrested and tortured by French police following a drug raid
at a youth hostel, a traumatic experience that led him to move to America. He
worked as a street vendor selling unique bird toys to tourists on San
Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, acquiring the nickname “The Birdman,” after
which he legally changed his name to Thomas Wiseau (a reworking of the French
word for bird). He was involved in a near-fatal car crash, the turning
point that led him to pursue his dream of becoming an actor and director.

Tommy threw himself into developing,
producing, directing and starring in his own script called The Room
despite having no knowledge of filmmaking (though he did have, strangely, a
seemingly inexhaustible bank account which enabled him to sink a jaw-dropping
$6 million into the making and marketing of this romantic drama). Sestero began
as a curious crew member but found himself pushed into replacing a key actor –
after filming had already begun.

It’s impossible to describe or
summarize the degree of the dictatorial Tommy’s ineptitude as a would-be Orson
Welles. He was unable to remember the simplest lines of his own dialogue, much
less deliver them capably. He drove actors and crew members either out of their
minds or out of the project altogether. He demanded that scenes be rewritten in
the middle of filming them, that sets be broken down but rebuilt again the
following day; that his muscular butt be prominently featured in his overlong sex
scenes. The result is an hallucinatory comedy of technical and artistic errors.

This didn’t discourage Tommy from
moving heaven and earth to promote The
Room, including paying for a massive billboard on highly-trafficked
Highland Avenue. The creepy
billboard featuring a droopy-eyed, unintentionally menacing Tommy stayed up
not for the usual couple of months or so, but inexplicably for a full five years, becoming a sort of Hollywood
landmark.

Despite the comedy, one moment
highlighted something for Sestero about his mysterious friend. After filming a
party scene in which Tommy’s character is at the center of a room full of happy
friends, Sestero realizes that the scene reflected the happiness, the friends,
the life that Tommy would have wanted for himself but never had.

The book closes with Sestero
attending Tommy’s “world premiere” of The
Room. When Tommy stood to introduce the film to the crowd,

he was completely
devoid of the bravado he’d always had in front of an audience. His hands
trembled as he raised the microphone to his mouth. He paused for a moment, too
overcome to speak… The audience became very still. Then, at last, Tommy managed
to say something: “This. This is my movie. This is my life. I hope you learn
something and discover yourself.”

Just before the house lights went
down, Tommy turned in his seat to smile at Sestero behind him. There were tears in his eyes. Some at
the premiere walked out demanding refunds, but the film went on to become an
international midnight movie hit along the lines of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Sestero concludes with a musing
about Tommy and the pursuit of dreams. At the risk of overreaching, I believe it
is an epiphany that could be applied to grand dreamers everywhere – in other
words, to all of us: “In the end, Tommy made me realize that you decide who you become. He also made
me realize what a mixed blessing that can
be.” [Emphasis added]

This past February, Seth Rogan and
James Franco picked
up the rights to The Disaster Artist
and will be co-producing a movie based on the book, starring Franco as Tommy,
whom the actor correctly describes as “part vampire, part Hollywood dreamer,
part gangster, part Ed Wood, and super lonely.” I hope they can capture not
only the unique hilarity of the book, but also the loneliness at the heart of
Tommy’s dream.

About Me

Mark is the editor of TruthRevolt and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes about culture and politics for Acculturated, FrontPage Magazine, The Federalist, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He has made television appearances on CNN, Glenn Beck and elsewhere, as well as many radio and public appearances.
Mark has worked on numerous films including co-writing the award-winning documentary “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.”
He is currently adapting a book for the big screen and writing one of his own for Templeton Press.